Imprisoned With ISIS: An American Journalist’s Experience in Post-Coup Turkey

Journalists face unprecedented challenges in Turkey—now the world's leading jailer of reporters

Lindsey Snell, pictured here in New York, is one of hundreds journalists to have been imprisoned in Turkey in recent years. She spent two months in Turkish prison in 2016. Joey L.

For more than two months, American journalist Lindsey Snell shared a cramped Turkish jail cell with a young ISIS recruit and two other women who were the wives of al-Qaeda fighters.

Her time there was horrifying. One day, Snell witnessed prison guards drag off one of the al-Qaeda fighters’ wives, who was pregnant and had gone into labor. The woman returned with a black eye, holding her newborn baby in a “ratty towel with holes in it.”